Target group: Early Career Investigators, Young Researchers and Innovators, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers
Approach: distributed mentoring through training, mobility, collaborative research, individual feedback and international networking
Download our Mentoring Program for Young Researchers.
Supporting early-career researchers through training, mobility, collaboration and individual guidance
Sustainability@Leave developed a mentoring and capacity-building programme to support Early Career Investigators and Young Researchers and Innovators across the Action. Rather than operating as a single universal one-to-one matching scheme, the programme used a distributed mentoring model, embedding guidance and career development in the scientific activities of the Action.
The programme was designed to give younger researchers repeated access to senior expertise, individual feedback, international mobility, collaborative research experience and integration into a European research network. Particular attention was given to researchers from Inclusiveness Target Countries and countries with more limited research capacity in the field of parenting-leave research.
The programme consisted of six complementary components
1. Training School mentoring and individual feedback
The 2024 Training School Work-care policies, gender and social inequalities brought together 20 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers as trainees and six senior experts as trainers. In addition to lectures and group discussion, participants received direct feedback and individual guidance from experienced researchers on their research questions, methodological approaches and ongoing work.
This created an intensive environment for scientific mentoring and helped young researchers develop their own research within a broader comparative and international perspective. The trainees came from 13 different countries, including three ITC countries. The cooperation between trainees and trainers continued afterwards and WG 2 co-deader Sonja Blum became a mentor of several students. A student from Bielefeld University arranged a co-supervisor.
Training School – Work-care policies, gender and social inequalities
2. Mentoring through Short-Term Scientific Missions, Virtual Mobility and Conference Grants
Short-Term Scientific Missions, Virtual Mobility and Conference Grants provided opportunities for researchers to work directly with colleagues and senior experts from other institutions and present their results in various countries. The Action supported 30 grants for young researchers – 12 were STSMs, 10 were VMGs and 8 were Conference Grants. More than 50 % of these were applicants from ITC countries.
These activities combined mobility with scientific guidance: participants developed a defined research task, worked with a host or collaborating team, received feedback during the activity and contributed to outputs or future collaborations.
The scientific content of the research grants centred on family policy, gender economics, and demographic sustainability, specifically examining paternity leave uptake, gender gaps in leave intentions, and the lived experiences of mothers. Furthermore, the projects analysed how paid parental leave and childcare policies influence labour market inequality, short-term fertility, and social sustainability, while establishing cross-country survey methodologies, screening tools, and literature databases for policy research.
Short-Term Scientific Missions
3. Learning-by-doing within Working Groups
Young researchers were integrated directly into the scientific work of the five Working Groups. They contributed to literature reviews, comparative analyses, methodological discussions, reports, policy briefs, stakeholder activities and other joint outputs.
Working alongside senior researchers enabled mentoring to take place through collaborative research itself: discussion of concepts and methods, feedback on drafts, co-authorship and shared responsibility for scientific outputs.
This model was particularly important because it moved mentoring beyond formal training events and embedded it in the day-to-day scientific work of the Action.
4. Publication and research-output mentoring
Senior Action members supported younger colleagues in developing contributions to joint reports, academic publications, book chapters and policy-oriented outputs.
Mentoring included feedback on research design, argumentation, comparative approaches, manuscript development and publication strategies. Young researchers were therefore not only recipients of training but active contributors to the Action’s scientific outputs.
5. Support for networking, collaboration and future funding
The Action created targeted opportunities for early-career researchers to establish international contacts through Working Group meetings, conferences, Training Schools, stakeholder workshops, STSMs and other networking activities.
Senior researchers also supported the development of new collaborations and, where relevant, research proposals and applications for external funding. This helped translate participation in the Action into longer-term research relationships extending beyond the COST funding period.
6. Open Online Course and reusable training resources
In 2026, Sustainability@Leave launched an Open Online Course on parenting-leave policies in Europe. The course was designed for students, early-career researchers and more experienced participants and provides an accessible introduction to the diversity of parenting-leave systems and their implications for gender relations, inequality and social sustainability.
Because the course remains openly available, it also constitutes a long-term mentoring and capacity-building resource beyond the formal duration of the Action. Organising of the course was also an opportunity for networking, so young researchers were involved even in this stage.
Who was the programme for?
The mentoring and capacity-building activities were open to researchers across the Action, with particular emphasis on:
- PhD students and postdoctoral researchers;
- Early Career Investigators / Young Researchers and Innovators;
- researchers from Inclusiveness Target Countries and countries with more limited capacity in the field;
- researchers entering parenting-leave research from other disciplines;
- participants seeking international research experience and collaboration.
The programme was aimed at all genders.
What did mentoring provide?
Across its different components, the programme gave participants access to:
- individual scientific feedback and guidance;
- methodological and conceptual training;
- international mobility and host-based supervision;
- participation in collaborative research;
- experience with reports, policy briefs and publications;
- stakeholder interaction;
- international networking;
- support in developing future research collaborations and funding proposals.
A distributed mentoring model
The Sustainability@Leave model demonstrates that mentoring within a large international research network does not need to rely exclusively on formal mentor–mentee matching.
Instead, mentoring was embedded across the Action through repeated interaction between junior and senior researchers, mobility, collaborative authorship, training, feedback and network participation. This distributed approach enabled mentoring to reach researchers at different career stages and from different countries while remaining closely connected to the scientific objectives of the Action.
Success stories of young researchers
Eva Waldaufová, Charles University, Prague, Czechia
For me, COST Sustainability@Leave opened doors that would otherwise have been difficult to access as a PhD student. A Young Researcher Conference Grant allowed me to attend the GGP User Conference, an inspiring experience that brought me into contact with researchers whose work I had long been reading and provided valuable feedback on my own research. Taking part in the Action’s Final Conference in Prague then helped me connect my doctoral work on reproductive planning with research on family and parental-leave policies, a link that has shaped how I think about fertility ever since. In September 2026, I successfully defended my dissertation and was nominated for the Dean’s Award of the Faculty of Science, Charles University. Above all, the Action showed me how much early-career researchers can gain from being part of an international network.
Merve Uzunalioglu, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Over the four years of the Action, I have benefited most from the opportunities available to young scholars like me. The training school Work-Care Policies, Gender and Social Inequalities gave us a platform to present our work in progress, receive feedback, exchange ideas with peers, and learn from more senior scholars. Some of the connections I made there expanded my collegial network, which is always a great bonus. The Action was also instrumental in advancing some of my working papers through the Virtual Mobility Grant. This funding stream enabled me to do focused work with mentorship from senior network members. The supportive leadership across the Action made this community an exceptionally pleasant place to be. I look forward to future collaborations, building on the connections I made and strengthened here.
Adriana Offredi R., Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Participating in COST Action CA21150 Sustainability@Leave, particularly as a member of Working Group 2 (WG2), has been extremely valuable for my academic and professional development as an early-career researcher. Indeed, the Action not only allowed me to deepen my understanding of how paid parental leave (PPL) contributes to social sustainability but also enabled me to explore the effects that work–care policies may have on gender and social inequalities. Being part of this Action also gave me the opportunity to engage with an international, interdisciplinary community of scholars working on closely related issues. This was particularly relevant to my research, which sits at the intersection of social policy, care, work–family relations, and inequalities, as it allowed me to situate my work within broader debates on how welfare policies can reproduce or mitigate inequalities.
One particularly important learning experience was my participation in the 2024 Training School “Work-care policies, gender and social inequalities” in Dubrovnik, which combined lectures from leading scholars with presentations by early-career researchers and opportunities for detailed discussion and feedback. The Training School enabled me not only to present one of the papers of my PhD thesis but also to discuss research questions and methodological approaches with peers at similar career stages and with researchers working on related topics. I continued this learning process through the Open Online Course on Parenting Leave Policies and Inequalities, which offered a valuable opportunity to stay engaged with recent scholarship and debates on leave, care, gender and inequality. More generally, my participation in WG2 was particularly beneficial in exposing me to comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives on how policy design, access and use can generate different forms of social inequality, complementing my own research interests and encouraging me to think more systematically about the relationship between formal policy entitlements and individuals’ actual opportunities to benefit from them.
Another significant benefit was the opportunity to disseminate my research internationally through a conference grant supported by the Action. Thanks to this support, I recently attended the 2026 ESPANET Annual Conference, where I presented my latest work on leave policies and flexible working arrangements and, for the first time, served as chair of a conference session. This experience was another crucial step in my PhD journey, as it allowed me to take a more active role in the research community and receive detailed feedback from junior and senior researchers.
Overall, the Sustainability@Leave Action has provided much more than individual training or dissemination opportunities. It has enabled sustained engagement with important scholarship in my field, broadened my theoretical and comparative perspectives, created opportunities to receive constructive feedback on my work, and helped me develop a network of peers and senior scholars with overlapping research interests. At a crucial stage in the transition from doctoral researcher to the next phase of my career, these experiences have strengthened both my research and my confidence in participating actively in international academic networks.